Inside the Law School Scam

Wednesday, March 4, 2015

For understandable reasons, the law school reform movement has traditionally been dominated by pessimism. Many critics have assumed that, as long as the federal government maintains its policy of lending the full cost of attendance (not just the full price of tuition) to anyone any ABA law school chooses to admit, no matter what that school chooses to charge, law schools would be able to more or less continue to conduct business as usual, as long as they were willing to continue to slash admissions standards enough to keep enough warm bodies coming through their doors.

That seemed like a reasonable assumption, but it's apparently turning out to be mistaken.

It's fair to say that admissions standards have now been cut as much as they can be cut, practically speaking. 80% of all applicants were admitted to at least one school to which they applied during the 2013-14 cycle. That number can't go much if at all higher, because a significant minority of applicants will only apply to schools that maintain various levels of real selectivity, and some of those people won't get into any of those schools.

In addition, perhaps 5% of the applicant pool in any year consists of people who have such serious behavioral red flags in their files that no school, even though most desperate, will admit them, if only because of potential liability concerns.

When it comes to law school admissions, we may not be at the metaphorical equivalent of -459.67F quite yet, but we're very close. Which means that any further declines in applicants are going to be matched by something close to an equivalent decline in matriculants.

Speaking of which, we're nearly three quarters of the way through the 2014-2015 admissions cycle, and applications are down yet another 7%. This means we can estimate this fall's entering class will be roughly around 35,300 1Ls, down from 52,500 just five years ago. Somewhere between 85% to 90% of those people will end up graduating, depending on various assumptions (Given the radical slashing of admissions standards at so many schools, it seems reasonable to assume drop out/flunk out rates may rise. OTOH every lost student hurts the already bleeding bottom line, so it's hard to say whether this will drive the historical non-completion rate below the 11%-12% it's been at in recent years).

Even on the high end, that means no more than 32,000 or so graduates will come out of the class of 2018, of which (being optimistic again) perhaps 90% will eventually pass a bar exam. So that's around 28,500 or so new prospective lawyers going into a system that can probably absorb -- this has to be no more than an educated guess -- perhaps 20,000 per year. If you're so inclined you can also add a couple thousand more or less legit "JD advantage" jobs to that total, and suddenly things look very different than the pre-reform status quo, in which schools dropped 45,000 new graduates onto the market every year (Last year's graduating class will be the last for a very, very long time that will be that large).

Now of course the massive contraction in law school graduates is only half the battle. For one thing, it needs to go further -- at least another 10% or 20% from where it will be three years from now, given current applicant levels. For another, and just if not more critically, law school tuition is still far, far too high -- absurdly so, despite increasing discounts off sticker by increasingly desperate schools.

Given likely career outcomes for the vast majority of law graduates who won't get prestige-driven legal jobs (BIGLAW and BIGFED), law school tuition at non-elite schools should be no more than $10,000 to $15,000 per year. So there's a long way to go.

But there's also lot to celebrate. The biggest of all the scam factories, Thomas Cooley, fired nearly 60% of its faculty last August. Thomas Jefferson had to give its shiny new building to its creditors, and limps along on life support. Hamline is effectively ceasing to exist, after a face-saving (for its parent university) "merger" with William Mitchell, that will leave the combined institutions with the same number of law students Mitchell had last year. And after a hurricane of bad publicity, the Infilaw scamsters are on the run.

I continue to write regularly on these issues at Lawyers, Guns and Money, as do others in various venues. In the last couple of years I've also written a number of things regarding the law school reform movement for academic journals. For example last month I published an article on the effects of stigmatization on lawyers and law graduates -- something that the commenters on this blog taught me a great deal about, and which might interest at least a few of them. (Anyone who doesn't have access to the article via Lexis etc. and who wants to read it can email me at paul.campos@colorado.edu, and I'll send you a copy).

Wherever and whoever you are in this movement, keep up the fight. We're winning.

Thursday, August 7, 2014

ITLSS started publishing three years ago today. The blog featured roughly daily posts (500 in all) for nearly 19 months, through February of 2013. During that time it received about three million page views, and it generated nearly 50,000 comments. On the eve of another academic year, this post looks back on the project from the perspective of what's changed and what hasn't in the law school world since the summer of 2011.

What's changed:

The central theme of the blog -- that there's a genuine crisis in legal academia, because law schools are turning out far too many graduates and far too high of a cost -- has gone from a fringe position in the academy, to a widely accepted view within it, and something like the conventional wisdom outside it.

Law school applications and enrollment have both plunged. The 2014 cycle featured about 55,000 applicants, down from 88,000 in 2010. Despite moderate to severe cuts in admissions standards at almost all law schools other than Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, the 2014 first year class will include somewhere between 37,000 and 38,000 students, down from 52,500 in 2010.

After decades of non-stop growth, average effective tuition (sticker tuition minus discounts) has at least flattened out and possibly even declined slightly over the last two to three years. This is a product of the combination of schools continuing to raise their sticker rates at faster than inflation, but offering deeper discounts to a larger percentage of their admits. The net effect of this has been to keep average tuition from rising in real terms, although of course this pattern exacerbates the reverse Robin Hood structure of contemporary legal education, in which students with lower entrance numbers (and, crucially, lower SES backgrounds) subsidize the attendance of their better-credentialed, richer, and better-connected classmates.

What hasn't changed:

The legal hiring market remains weak. Only a bit more than half of all ABA law school graduates are getting real legal jobs (full-time, long-term, bar admission required), and this percentage drops to less than half at many schools. Only around 15% of graduates get jobs that pay salaries which make taking on $150,000 in educational debt (around the average for the 85% of graduates who borrow, once we include accrued interest and undergraduate debt) appear to be a good investment, at least from a short-term perspective.

The long-term economic prospects of current law graduates remain very unclear, for many reasons. What's clear is that the high salaries paid to the "lucky" minority who initially get jobs with big law firms can be somewhat illusory (a 2013 Stanford law grad told me yesterday that several of his classmates who started in big law a year ago have already left, whether voluntarily or not), and that extrapolating the lifetime earnings of people who graduated from law school in 1974 or 1984 or even 1999 to people who graduated in 2014 is a form of methodological question-begging, if it's presented as doing anything more than presenting one piece of mildly suggestive but problematic evidence in regard to the answer to the question of what is going to happen to current law graduates in the long run.

The fundamental economic structure of legal education -- in which most of the operating revenue for most law schools comes from federal educational loans subject to essentially no actuarial controls -- remains in place. Transparency in regard to employment outcomes -- which pretty much didn't exist three years ago -- has been in large part achieved, and it has accomplished quite a bit by itself, as evidenced by the plunge in application and enrollment numbers. But while the situation is better, it's still the case that far too many people are paying far too much to go to law school. (My back of the envelope calculation is that national first year classes ought to be around 25,000 matrics, and that effective tuition ought to be around $10,000 per year, if we want legal education to be a good investment for a large majority of prospective law students going forward).

Looking back with the benefit of both three years' additional perspective, and the changes that have taken place over that time, I wish this blog had spent more time connecting the crisis in legal education to the crisis which is slowly but surely enveloping higher education in America in general. That latter crisis is a product of deep economic and cultural changes, which have left an entire generation of young Americans over-educated and under-employed (I explore the ways in which legal education is something of a proverbial canary in a coal mine for these much broader trends in a forthcoming article in the September issue of the Atlantic.)

But hindsight is notoriously more accurate than foresight. This blog played its part in helping some people -- not least its primary author -- understand the troubled world of contemporary legal education. The thing now is to change it.

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

A great deal has happened over the past ten months. This post is an update on developments, and an opportunity for members of the old ITLSS community to touch base with each other, and to perhaps learn of other venues where the conversation continues.

Major developments:

(1) As word regarding the employment situation for new and not so new law graduates percolates down into the general cultural conversation, law school enrollments and applications continue to decline sharply. 39,675 students matriculated at ABA schools this fall -- a 24.4% decline since 2010, and the lowest total since 1975, when there were 40 fewer law schools.

(2) Application totals continue to fall faster than law school enrollments. Preliminary numbers suggest that around 51,000 people will apply to law school in this cycle, which in turn is likely to produce another 10-12% decline in enrollments next fall. Even if enrollment numbers level out over the next couple of years, ABA law schools are about to face a world in which they will have 95,000 to 100,000 JD students enrolled at one time, as opposed to nearly 150,000 in 2010-11.

(3) Most law schools now appear to be losing money, and law school budgets almost everywhere will undergo even more severe stress as the entering classes of 2011 and 2012 are replaced by much smaller cohorts over the next two to three years.

(4) The stress on budgets is a product not just of declining enrollment, but also of what at many schools is declining per capita real net tuition. A few schools have actually started to slash nominal tuition, and many others have increased "scholarships" (tuition discounts) to such a degree that they are charging lower tuition in real terms (discount and inflation adjusted) than they were two years ago. The combination of declining enrollment and stagnant or declining per capita real tuition has created formal and de facto hiring freezes at many schools. Entry-level hiring this year seems likely to be at around one third to one half of pre-enlightenment levels.

(5) Although schools are going to extraordinary measures to disguise the fact, faculty layoffs have taken place at several places, in the form of offer you can't refuse "buyouts." Staff firings are commonplace. It remains difficult to say when and if an ABA school will actually close, but expect to see some schools merge (constructive closures), and a couple of others spin off separate campuses into independent entities which will be allowed to disappear by their central administrations.

Beyond these specific developments, it's fair to say that the general atmosphere in legal academia is radically different than it was three years ago. Back then, the crisis was invisible, because it was only affecting our graduates, which meant there were an almost unlimited number of rationalizations available for denying its existence. (It's a few malcontents, it's the recession, law degrees are versatile, network! etc. etc.). As always, we are all strong enough to bear other men's misfortunes, but to cut one's own finger is a different matter.

In short, consciousness has been raised, and continues to be raised. For those who may have missed it, here are two new sites that are doing some fine work:

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

I began this blog one summer afternoon in exactly way I’ve
started every other professional project I’ve undertaken which ever amounted to
anything: without thinking about whether doing so would achieve anything worth
achieving, or at least win the approval of important people.

I started it because I had something to say, and this seemed
a good way of saying it. For a few days I wrote anonymously – something I had
never done before – more as a stylistic experiment than anything else.But naturally people in legal academia
instantly became more concerned with Who Was Saying These Outrageous Things
than in whether those things might actually be true.So I dropped the mask -- which ensured that a
few of those people would busy themselves henceforth with irrelevant personal
attacks, rather than substantive responses.

19 months and 499 posts later, it turns out that the core
message of this blog – that legal academia is operating on the basis of an unsustainable economic model, which requires most law students to borrow more money to get
law degrees than it makes sense for them to borrow, given their career
prospects, and that for many years law schools worked hard, wittingly or
unwittingly, to hide this increasingly inconvenient truth from both themselves
and their potential matriculants – has evolved from a horrible heresy to
something close to conventional wisdom.

That enrolling in law school has become a very dangerous
proposition for most people who consider enrolling in one is now, if not a
truth universally acknowledged, something that legal academia can no longer
hide, either from ourselves, or – far more important – from anyone who doesn’t
go out of his or her way to avoid contact with the relevant information.

ITLSS has played a role in what can be without exaggeration
called a fundamental shift in the cultural conversation.How big of a role it’s not for me to judge. Within
legal academia, the pioneering work of Bill Henderson on the economics of legal
education, and Brian Tamanaha’s writing and research culminating in his book Failing Law Schools, were both critical
contributions to that shift. Others
inside law schools – Jim Chen, Deborah Rhode, Herwig Schlunk, Akhil Amar,Ian Ayers, Paul Caron, Ben Trachtenberg, Orin
Kerr, and Jeffery Harrison to name a few – have moved the conversation forward
in various ways.And of course Deborah
Merritt has lent her name and talents to this blog for nearly a year now as a
co-author, greatly enhancing both its intellectual and stylistic range.

Outside the legal academy, a diverse group of voices,
ranging from the scam blogs that had such a strong effect on at least Tamanaha
and me, to Above the Law and JD Underground, to the tireless unpaid labor of
Kyle McEntee, Patrick Lynch, and Derek Tokaz, aka Law School Transparency,
found their way into the pages of the New York Times and the Wall Street
Journal, and onto the CBS Evening News.A movement that begun on the margins of the legal world, through the work of people like
Loyola 2L, and Scott Bullock of Big Debt/Small Law, and Nando of Third Tier
Reality, has gone mainstream.

This blog is now the length of about four typical academic
books.Anyone who wants to browse
through it will find posts touching on just about every topic related to legal
education and the legal profession regarding which I have something to
say.Readers looking for a more concise
statement can buy or borrow a copy of my book Don’t Go to Law School (Unless), either in paperback or e-book
form.

All of which is to say that I’ve said what I have to say, at
least in this format.I’ll continue to
write on this topic, both in academic venues, in the popular media, and even
from time to time in blog form, at Lawyers, Guns and Money.But the time has come to move on from here.

I’ve never written anything about the professional and personal price I
ended up paying for starting to investigate, more than a year before I began
this blog, the structure of contemporary American legal education.Perhaps I’ll tell that story someday.For now I’ll merely note that if people
enjoying the extraordinary protections afforded by tenure aren’t willing to
confront institutional corruption, then academic tenure is an indefensible
privilege.

People have asked me how I can continue to be on a law
faculty, given my views.This question –
when it isn’t simply a hostile attempt to derail conversation – is based on a
misunderstanding.I very much believe
in the potential value of higher education.And I believe that legal education can and must be reformed
radically.(On one level the most
important short-term reforms couldn’t be simpler:the cost of law school attendance must be
reduced drastically, and the number of people graduating from law school must
be decreased by a significant amount. In the longer term, the American legal
system will need to confront whether it is either pedagogically justifiable or
financially viable to continue to require the basic law degree to be acquired
through postgraduate education).

In some very concrete, practical ways, reform is much easier to achieve from the inside. I’m proud of the fact
that, as of this coming fall, my law school is on track to have cut tuition in
real dollar terms over the past two years – something which perhaps no other
ABA law school will be able to claim.I’m
proud that CU Law School, which two years ago was publicizing highly inaccurate
employment information, is now one of the most transparent schools in the
country on this score.I don’t happen to
believe that I would be more effective working for reform as an ex-law
professor. Still, even if I did believe this, I’m well aware I wouldn’t have the
moral courage to quit. That makes my belief suspiciously convenient -- but it
doesn’t make it false.

In any case, reform driven by forces both outside and inside
the law school establishment is essential, and it’s beginning to happen.

I hope and believe that, as the unsustainable and unjust
nature of the status quo becomes more and more apparent, more people inside law
schools will openly advocate for real change.

In closing, I would like to thank the commenters on this
site.Nearly 50,000 comments have been
posted here.With very rare exceptions, I
chose not to censor what anyone had to say because one goal of this project,
both on this blog and elsewhere, has been to give voice to people who have been
carrying their anger, shame, and grief in silence.Helping to break that silence is what this
blog has been all about, and internet commenters, here and elsewhere, have
played a critical role in doing so.

I would wish everyone good luck but I won’t.It sounds terrible when you think about it.

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

As I've mentioned before, probably the most crucial knowledge gap that needs to be filled by people pursuing legal academic reforms is in regard to medium and long-term (as opposed to short-term) career outcomes for law graduates. Here's a letter that drives that point home with special force. It ends with a request for suggestions as to options -- one which I hope some readers can answer more usefully than I can:

Professor Campos:

I have a feeling you get a lot of e-mail messages like this,
and you probably do not have time to respond to them all, but I thought I would
give it a shot. I will try to give you an abbreviated version.

I graduated from [elite university] with a B.A. in [social
science major] in 1994. I was on scholarship, so I managed to graduate
with no debt. Not that these things matter 20 years after the fact, but I
had a 3.6 GPA and a 178 LSAT. I worked for [politician] between college
and law school. I graduated from [top ten law school] in 2000. My
GPA was a 3.5, which was well above the mean but not good enough for law
review. I clerked for a federal district court judge from 2000-2002,
during which time my law school loans were in forbearance. My point is
that, although my resume wasn’t printed with gold ink when I began my legal
career, my credentials were good.

After my clerkship, I went into private practice. I
have taken more than 200 depositions, argued motions in court more than 100
times, conducted several multi-day trials, propounded and answered more
discovery than I care to think about, and drafted countless briefs, motions,
and pleadings. Most of my work has been in business and real estate law,
so I have also drafted stock and asset sale documents, employment and
non-compete agreements, employee manuals, sexual harassment policies,
commercial leases, finance leases, business formation documents, company
minutes, trademark applications, loan documents, and deeds. In other
words, unlike a recent law school grad, I’ve been around the block a couple of
times, I have some experience, and I know how to do some things.

I was laid off in late 2010, and I have been out of work
ever since. There were no accusations of misconduct, no complaints about
my work. The law firm was downsizing, and that was that.

I’m 41 years old, I’ve been out of law school for
13 years, and I do not have a book of business, so evidently, my career as
a lawyer is over. I have a wife and 2 kids who need me to work, but I
don’t know how to do anything other than practice law. Instead, my wife
works, and I am a de facto stay-at-home dad. It’s not that I don’t
love being a dad (of course I do), but my family needs my income, and I need to
work outside the home.

As depressing as my situation is, I know it is so much worse
for so many people. I have read their stories on your blog and in the
comments. At least I had 8 productive years as a working attorney.
I paid my student loans down from $120,000 to the current balance of $23,000.
As long as my wife has a job, we won’t starve. And our kids are
wonderful. Knowing how much worse it is for so many people, I feel
guilty complaining about my situation.

For most of my career I have wondered, and occasionally
asked out loud, “What happens to all the lawyers?” Just based on my own
personal observation, I could see how few lawyers actually made partner.
So where do they go? Oh sure a few go in house, some end up working for
the government, etc., but just based on what I could see and the lawyers I
knew, the numbers didn’t add up. Lawyers just seemed to disappear, like
entrepreneurs in Atlas Shrugged. And then, of course, I
disappeared.

Since I was laid off, I have floundered around, applying for
jobs, representing a few clients as a solo practitioner (not that that has been
lucrative – think very low five figures per year), and trying to figure out
“What happens to all of the lawyers?” Finally, a few weeks ago, a Google
search landed me on a scamblog (I don’t remember which one anymore). That
scamblog led me to another, then another, and another, and then your YouTube
videos of your interview with Blooomberg Law and your presentation at Stanford
Law School. Then Google searches for “Paul Campos” led me to your blogs, and
then I learned who Brian Tamanaha is, and then I read his book.

Yes, believe it or not, I had no idea about the scamblogs
until just a few weeks ago. It seems hard to believe now, but why would
I? I graduated from law school a long time ago now – before law schools
produced most of the glut of lawyers. Times were good when I was looking
for a job in 1999 and the early 2000s. I have been busy – practicing law,
having a family, then dealing with my own unemployment (for which I have blamed
myself). And after I was laid off, I have had very little contact with lawyers,
and I haven’t had contact with law school students or recent law school grads
in years. On the rare occasion that I do talk to a law school classmate
or contemporary, no one ever acknowledges any problems – everyone claims to be
on top of the world, knocking the ball out of the park. Now, thanks to
the scamblogs, I know that some (many?) of my classmates have to have
ended up like me.

Of course the scamblogs, your YouTube videos, and Tamanaha’s
book are no comfort. Actually, they’re terrifying. But now,
finally, I have some idea about “What happens to all the lawyers?” At
least now I am dealing with reality. Before I was trying to solve a
problem (my unemployment) with bad information. Now, at least, I
know.

It is tempting to let myself focus on my anger about the
injustice of the macro situation and my sadness about the hopelessness of my
personal situation. It infuriates me that my alma mater and the other law
schools have essentially ruined many of their alumni’s careers by actions they
took after we graduated. Yet my alma mater still relentlessly
solicits me to “give back” – as if I owe them something. You will not be
surprised to learn that my alma mater has never taken any interest in my career
– or even bothered to find out if I have one. As for my specific
situation, I feel like it’s hopeless, and I think I am a failure. I
literally have no idea what to do.

My wife has not been especially understanding about my
situation. I think her thinking has been that of course someone
with my resume can easily find a job, and since I haven’t, the problem
must be that I am not trying very hard, which she resents. That all
changed, however, when I showed her this.
I had printed it out on paper, along with all of the comments that had been
posted in the first 12 hours. It was about 100 pages long. Someone
with better credentials than I is living in his father’s basement and has sent
out 700+ resumes with no results. Somehow it was comforting and made us
sick to our stomachs at the same time. Then there were your comments
about how little information there is about long-term career outcomes and your
question about what happens after the top law school and the big law firm –
yes, FINALLY, someone else is asking “What happens to all the lawyers?”!
Then the comments. So many comments. So many lawyers out of work,
in debt, with no hope. The stack of paper alone was enough to bring tears
to my wife’s eyes. When I told her that all of the comments had been
posted since 5:58 a.m. that morning, she broke down and cried.

So, my efforts to keep this brief have failed, but perhaps I
can pull it all together with two points. First, thank you for what you
are doing. It has mattered to me and my family. And I am
sure it matters to many others. Second, do you have any advice, any at
all, for someone in my situation? I am not like a recent law grad who
laments that he/she can’t get a job and doesn’t know how to practice law.
My problem is the other way around: I can’t get a job, and I don’t know how to
do anything except practice law. I cannot hide my J.D. or the 13
years since I graduated law school. I am a real, live lawyer with a J.D.,
a license, and years of experience. But no one will pay me to practice
law anymore, and I don’t know how to do anything else. Yes, of course,
big changes are coming to law schools and the legal profession, many reforms
need to be implemented, and prospective law students need to be warned.
It’s not that I am not interested in those things, but I have more immediate
problems to solve. I have 2 kids, a mortgage, and 25 more years to work –
I can’t waste time being angry at my alma mater, wallowing in my sadness, or
pontificating about law schools and my profession. I need to find a way
to earn some money SOON. Do you have any suggestions for someone like
me?

Monday, February 25, 2013

This thread on TFL provides a sobering glimpse into what's happening to both the legal academic hiring market and the market for high-status and otherwise desirable non-entry level lawyer jobs (BigLaw mid-level or senior associate, DOJ/USA/Federal agency jobs, cush in-house gigs with big companies, and so forth).

Long story short: lots of people with golden credentials are doing Visiting Assistant Professor gigs, striking out in the increasingly brutal academic market, and finding that they don't have the option to return to their old jobs or indeed anything similar to their old jobs. The reasons will come as no surprise to anyone who has had much in the way of contact with the contemporary market for lawyers: openings for the kinds of jobs most VAPs had are scarce, and it's an extreme buyer's market.

Hiring partners are generally suspicious of people who tried to bail for academia, are often openly contemptuous of the law school world, and usually have little interest in taking on expensive senior associates with no book of business. Government hiring is either completely frozen or extraordinarily selective at both the federal and state level, and if anything desirable government jobs are now even harder to get than big firm positions. Good in-house positions are coveted by top associates at elite firms, who are in a far better position to get them than itinerant quasi-academics on the lam from BigLaw. Etc.

All this produces But I Did Everything Right syndrome on steroids: people with HYS law degrees, appellate court clerkships, several years of experience at V-10 firms, etc. etc., are finding themselves looking at flat-out unemployment, and are coming to the horrifying realization that, in this business of ours, a formerly golden resume starts spoiling faster than a plate of sashimi left out in a tropical sun. (Some current law professors will be finding this out first-hand soon enough).

Adding to the angst in the VAP world are the realization that taking a job with a low-ranked school may well be a prelude to even more intractable unemployment a few years down the line; that, leaving aside the inherent risk of such jobs, lots of low-ranked law schools shouldn't exist anyway; that some VAP programs are functionally exploitative, in that they produce very little chance of getting a tenure-track job anywhere while extracting cheap teaching resources for academic hopefuls; that it's routine for people in the latter circumstance to have vastly superior entry-level credentials to those the senior faculty at the schools they're at had when they were hired in the palmy days when the Police were the hot new band; and that a career dedicated to successfully crafting a perfect resume can easily crash and burn for reasons completely beyond one's control.

Needless to say this spectacle is producing waves of schadenfreude among the legal precariat, and a growing sense of dread among all but the most purblind law professors, who realize we are increasingly becoming this generation's version of what a 50-year-old autoworker with an upper middle class salary and great benefits was back when the Police were a hot new band.

Sunday, February 24, 2013

Legal educators are still fantasizing that law firms will create more positions for new lawyers. The latest pipe dream suggests that big firms will "give talented graduates of less prestigious institutions a chance to shine" in residencies that teach lawyering skills. Although the firms will retain only some of the residents, a compassionate bar association will require those firms to "offer stipends to help those residents who don't make the cut but have debt burdens."

Law firms, as I've suggested before, must find this advice hilarious. Will partners eagerly step forward to train more associates than they need? Are BigLaw firms excited about teaching these extra associates how to handle eviction cases for low-income clients? Are bar members pining to reduce their income to help new lawyers pay off their massive law school debts?

I think not. Law firms are businesses competing in a harsh climate. Law schools vie to land jobs for their graduates, but that's bush league competition: We only have to worry about jobs for one year, we can create low-paid jobs of our own, and we can play games with the numbers. Law firms compete in the real market, one where the bills have to be paid every year, clients would laugh if you asked them to create some work for you, and playing games with the bottom line is fraud or embezzlement.

The report recognizes that "since 2008, law firms have cut back significantly on their hiring and have gone through several rounds of lay-offs of both legal and non-legal staff." Despite those cuts, the firms still suffer from "overcapacity in terms of the number of lawyers available to perform the work at hand." And the problem isn't resolving, it's getting worse: "In the four years since [2008], with demand growth negative to flat, the overcapacity problem has become even more serious." (p. 16)

What's the solution? "Firms have . . . begun to move toward more flexible staffing models, expanding their use of non-partner track associates, staff attorneys, and contract lawyers. Going forward, it is likely that firms will remain conservative in their hiring policies, even as demand begins to grow. As a result, firms probably will be relatively smaller in terms of the number of partners and traditional partner-track associates and relatively larger in terms of the number of other lawyers and non-lawyer professionals." (p. 16)

So, yes, law firms are developing new staffing models. But these are not residencies designed to train new professionals or assist the poor. These are jobs that will help equity partners maintain their profits. And these jobs will not provide more opportunities for "talented graduates of less prestigious institutions" to show their ability. As jobs for conventional partner-track associates continue to decline, even T14 graduates will compete for these new positions--hoping for their "chance to shine."

Law firms do find one bright spot in today's legal market: it is the oversupply of lawyers. The Georgetown report recognizes this quite candidly: "While excess capacity in the market is certainly not good news for young lawyers or, for that matter, law schools, it provides an environment in which law firms should have the flexibility to redesign their staffing models to respond to client demands. By embracing alternative approaches to staffing--including increased use of staff attorneys and non-partner track associates, contract lawyers, and part-time attorneys--firms can create more efficient and cost effective ways to deliver legal services." (p. 17)

It's hard to find a more brutal statement of market reality than that one: the glut of lawyers created by law schools is allowing law firms to hire those graduates on increasingly contingent and unattractive terms. These new jobs are not designed to train new lawyers in skills they can take to other job sites. Once you have worked two years as a back-office document reviewer, what professional skills do you have--other than reviewing documents? These jobs will serve the economic interest of law firms.

And before any legal educators get all huffy about how law firms should recognize their professional obligations rather than simply operating as businesses: How many law faculty are voluntarily taking pay cuts to reduce tuition? How many are contributing substantial amounts to loan-repayment assistance plans? How many are voluntarily changing what they teach, or the time they devote to research, in order to lower the cost of legal education? How many devote 40 hours a year (one week) to serving low-income clients directly? How many spend that time training or supervising other lawyers in providing that service?

There are some professors who do these things, just as there are some law firm partners who forego income to mentor new lawyers. But there aren't very many. Law schools, just like law firms, have become full-bore businesses. The controlling members of these businesses, equity partners and tenured professors, serve their own interests and maximize their take-home pay.

In a market system, there's nothing wrong with businesses maximizing profit. The problem, with both law firms and law schools, is that we clothe ourselves in the rhetoric and privileges of a profession while pursuing market goals. As clients have gained the information they need to assert their interests--and newbusinesses have emerged to serve those interests--it's our students and new lawyers who pay the price for our duplicity.